One thing I notice about me is I’m deep . . . deeper than most people care to go. Thomas claims my “deep-osity” is the whole reason I see things. He says my visceral feelings, about shit I’ve been through and my inability to get past whatever it is, clashes.
“Like colliding atoms,” Thomas says when I mention the floating amber eyes and round, chapped, suckling lips. “Makes you see shit that ain’t there.”
“Really though,” I challenge. “You teach science. You know atoms are invisible, even when they collide.”
“Not true,” Thomas claps back. “I read in a journal they fuzz a little when smashed.”
“So, you believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing,” I ask.
We’re having this conversation as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, leaning over the vanity that sits low, just right for my five-foot four-inch frame. Thomas stands behind me in the hallway. I can see his reflection in the mirror. He hunches his shoulders. “Ehhh! Sort of . . . Maybe?”
I mock shrug him in return. “That’s all you have for me, Mr. Science Guy. All those videos with you in the white coat, using vernacular demonstrations that usually end in explosions to teach kids science.”
“Like what kid can bypass the chance to blow shit up or watch someone else do it,” Thomas says. He smiles and steps inside the bathroom, collapsing his six-foot frame until his body eclipses mine. I rub his tan-brown arms as they wrap around my waist. His hands tap my protruding belly. “Just a few more days and we’ll have our little girl in our arms for real,” he says, hooking his chin over my shoulder.
The amber eyes recede some, forming an optical diagonal comparison between me, Thomas, and them. The eyes and mouth reveal nothing about gender and even less about their choice on the matter. So, I refer to the apparition—this soul—not dead, not born, but somewhere in between—as “they”. Anyways, I’m not sure why they’re here. Maybe to torture me for having the nerve to move on but hopefully to forgive.
I tilt my head toward the mirror, searching my eyes, light brown and walnut-shaped and then Thomas’s. Large, round, and dark. Unlike the glaring amber-colored orbs suspended above us both. Sometimes, their little lips appear, too, but not always. They have been coming to me since I found out I was pregnant, over eight months ago.
I told Thomas the minute their visits became regular. At the time, we did not know we were having a girl, so I let him think maybe our baby is giving me a preview. One time, he wondered aloud why the eyes would be amber and round, different from us both. I didn’t care to elaborate, then, but I’m too scared not to say something.
How do you think it makes a woman feel when she lets someone destroy the life inside her . . . a life she wants? I did once, back when the man I was with was no man at all and took matters into his own hands. To hell with my choice.
Thomas is not like the other man. He will be a great father to this little one. That’s why I’ve got to tell Thomas all about it. He won’t understand if I wait much longer, especially with this little one days away from burrowing from my body, grasping for daylight.
“But why are their lips chapped?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Thomas returns. “Maybe you need to drink more water.”
Thomas kisses me from the crook to the top of my neck. When his eyes reach mine again, I start. “Baby, you remember Sonny?”
The child inside me protests, kicking me hard, repeatedly. “Ouch,” I complain, rubbing my belly until she calms down. It’s almost like she knows her father already, an Aboriginal Hawaiian descendant, raised in Houston, Texas. I met him there, where we were both teaching in a program that erased our student loans and covered tuition for master’s degrees. Back in Houston, people often mistook him for being Afro- Mexicano or Negro. Anyways, we dated for the three years we were in the program. Afterwards, we married and moved to Chicago, where I was raised.
People, here, see us together—me with my closely cropped, knotty locs and caramel-colored skin and him with his full lips and wide nose, and assume he’s African American. But they’re stumped by his thick, silky black curls and wonder aloud if he’s mixed. Doesn’t matter to me. Thomas and I are like a Venn diagram—different cultures, similar values.
Like, we both don’t believe in abortion personally though we support a woman’s right to choose. Choose. I push past that word. I’ve got to tell him. He will understand, I think.
I look past Thomas to see a suckling mouth hanging below the amber eyes.
“Baby, did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Like someone smacking?”
Thomas’s hands cease kneading my stomach. He stands up straight, searching my face. “Do I need to get my Te-Te Jan to send us some Ti- leaves?” He arches an eyebrow. A grin slants between his mouth and chin.
“For what?”
Thomas puts his hands on his hips. “Chase away the evil spirits. That’s what,” he snorts.
I exhale. Sharing my truth is going to be harder than I expected. “They’re not an evil spirit. They… ummm.” My eyes tear as I search for the right words to say.
Thomas takes my hand and leads me back to the bedroom. We get as far as the hallway when I become triggered by what happened between me and Sonny the night I lost my first baby. I was just seven weeks along then. They were no larger than a tadpole but still mine to protect. I jerk myself free.
“I’m too far along. You know that.” I’m angry now, thinking about Sonny, that selfish bastard.
Thomas’s grin flattens. “Whoa. I just thought we’d hold each other.
I’d never do anything to hurt our little girl.”
“Maybe, we shouldn’t count our egg before she’s hatched,” I said.
Thomas guides me to a bench in our hallway. He sits and pulls me onto his lap. His head rests on my chest. He exhales. “Tell me about Sonny, the jerk-bastard that left you for that professor at Loyola.”
My head bobbles. “You mean the dick who punctured my tires for three straight weeks when he’d found out I’d moved on. That dick?”
Thomas only knows Sonny and I broke up twice. Sonny shattered my trust and caused me to armor my spirit and particularly my heart. Thomas’s patient, kind nature penetrated the rings of iron, protecting me from fake love. He cared and adored me until I could return the sentiment.
“Did you run into him?” he asks, alarmed. He leans back, searches my face. His eyebrows pinch together. “Did he upset you?”
“No, of course not,” I say, wagging my head.
“Okay, then,” he says. I watch his eyebrows return to their natural positions.
But I know his okay is a signal he doesn’t want to continue talking about Sonny. I think about letting go, but I know I’ve got to tell him. Honesty is a step toward self-forgiveness. Maybe then, they can rest in my heart instead of haunting my mind. Maybe . . .
I look toward the family room, where a large window allows the sun to drift in and spread out. Their eyes are gone. The suckling mouth is silent. I leap ahead. “I was pregnant before. Sonny was the father,” I say.
Thomas eases me off his lap and looks through the gap between his legs to the floor. “What? But you told the doctor you’d never been . . .”
My eyes hold onto the sun, reaching toward me from our living room window and encouraging me to keep going. “I was ashamed.”
“Too ashamed to tell me?” he asks.
I don’t answer that. “I was about seven weeks when Sonny broke up with me.”
“You had to go through a pregnancy by yourself. What happened to the baby? Adoption?”
“Never got that far,” I say, wishing I could be one with the sun, sort of like the moon before it was expelled to wander the night. Suddenly, the baby inside me busies herself moving and kicking and something else. The lower part of my stomach clutches, releases and starts over again. My eyes squinch with every tense contraction. “Oooh-wee.”
Thomas rises from his seat, kneads my shoulders. His forehead wrinkles. “Is it time?” he asks, his voice cracking like a prepubescent boy.
“Not yet but awfully close,” I say. “I need to finish this.” I pause. The tears roll as I go on. “I thought we were having make-up sex until all the blood and the clots.”
*
My mind surfs memories—so distorted and emaciated by fear fused with my need to forget and move on. How can I share a traumatic event I still can’t make sense of?
I return to the day when Sonny and I ran into each other, a few weeks after he’d left me. We bumped into each other at a 7-Eleven convenience store near my apartment.
I was trudging through the aisles, looking for snacks. My confidence hovered a little above my feet. My gaze, too. I might have missed him had he not called my name.
“Bernie,” he called out like a barista asking if I wanted coffee or tea. I looked up into a set of fiery amber eyes, pearly whites flashing. “Sonny,” I returned. “Surprised to see you out this way.”
“Yeah, every now and then I come out to the health club near my mom’s house.”
“Oh,” I said.
The man was lying through his teeth. Hyde Park, where his mother lived, was a long way from Chicago’s East Side.
“You’re carrying a lot of weight for someone who is not even three months yet,” he said, touching my stomach. I hadn’t noticed. Sweats, tees, sadness, and grief had been my go-to uniform for weeks since he’d left me alone and pregnant.
“Why don’t we meet at the gym and maybe hang out,” he suggested. “I can’t have my girl walking around here looking like a rooster.” He flipped the back end of the red kerchief covering my hair. I remember thinking, I’m pregnant, fool. Weight gain is a given . . . Wait a minute did he call me his girl?
“Now,” I asked, trying not to jump into his arms. “What about the baby?”
“Pregnant women exercise all the time,” he said. “Your baby will be fine.”
I wanted to trip over his use of the pronoun your instead of our. But I was caught up. He was Sonny Taylor, an athlete who chose medical school over professional sports. He was a son of the Black elite or, as my mother would say, Black Wall Street. He was my first love. And I could snatch him back from the woman who stole his heart, like yanking my purse from a thief.
I ran back to my apartment to shower and change into a black spandex T-shirt and loose shorts. Hope, filled with sunrises, sunsets, and the moon in between, blossomed. After a few hours, I returned to my place with him in tow. The flowers I’d set on the coffee table before I left greeted us with large colorful blooms. Wine and cheese cooled in the refrigerator. I expected passionate lovemaking. I got something different.
Sonny became aggressive the minute we walked through the door. He threw his gym bag on the floor near the shoes lined up along the wall and plodded across my carpet in his street shoes. He knew I didn’t like folks to walk inside my place with their shoes on, but he couldn’t care less. I tried to coax him to the couch. He had other ideas.
He nudged me in the chest with such force I fell on my butt onto to the floor. My insides quaked on impact. He pounced on top of me. Sonny’s 240-pounds pressed my back down into the concrete floor, where the thread-bare rug failed as a cushion. He yanked off my shorts and panties and jabbed his hand inside me, repeatedly clutching at my insides. No kissing. No foreplay.
Fear replaced the hope I’d had earlier. But I didn’t fight him or complain. I wanted him to stay, to change his mind about us. Pleasing people who had hurt me was common for me back then. Guess that happens when you grow up trying to rise to the endless expectations of parents who only notice you in a crisis. No accolades for the good grades, the sports trophies, and the scholarships.
As he continued to plunge inside me, I felt like someone was wringing my insides. I asked Sonny to ease up, but he was relentless. He grabbed my shirt and jerked my body into various positions. “Hold on,” I begged. But Sonny was clueless to my pleas, harshly whispering something ugly in my ear. My body convulsed and I involuntarily climaxed, shaming me that his disdain for my body and the fetus I carried reaped a response he would brag about later.
When he was done, I didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, Sonny slid out the door, grabbing his gym bag on the way out. He didn’t say goodbye. No kiss to the forehead. No sorry or gasped worry that he may have harmed our baby. Nothing. My shirt was tattered. My ass was bare. Confusion consumed me.
After the door clicked shut behind him, I rose and gingerly ambled over to my kitchen. I pulled cleanser and a glass mixing bowl from the cabinet and returned to my living room to scoop up the clots. I emptied the cleanser onto the stains and scrubbed until a sharp pain in my stomach reminded me I should go to the ER. I hurried to the bathroom to change clothes and flush the clots. I held onto the glass bowl for some reason, but on my way out I raised the damn thing over my head and hurled it toward the kitchen floor, not bothering to pick up the pieces.
*
Thomas is talking. “What the hell!” Anger tightens his features and then relaxes. He takes a deep breath. “Go on,” he says.
My chin drops to my chest. “I’m partly to blame. I should have known better. Sonny had told me he never wanted children. I was so eager to please, back then. I thought I could change his mind, but . . .” I bend over and cradle my stomach. “Oh boy, that was something, right there.”
Thomas runs into the bedroom, grabs my purse and suitcase. “We’ve got to go. Tell me later.” He races toward the garage door, tosses my and the baby’s things inside our car, and returns for me.
“Thomas, I’m not going anywhere until I tell you this.”
“Tell me while we’re walking. Start with the part of how make-up sex led to aborting your baby, and don’t forget to breathe.”
His voice is tight with something that I can’t figure out. Judgment, maybe? I hope not, but I can’t stop with half of the truth . . . which really isn’t the truth at all.
I blow air out of my mouth in quick intervals, like panting but not really. “I didn’t think a hand and arm could be as efficient as a hanger. It happened just after the right to an abortion was dismantled in some states. It was still a question here in Illinois. But I didn’t know that’s what he wanted so that he could be with her. I thought he was coming back. The foreplay was rough, almost animalistic, but I didn’t know anything was wrong until . . .”
“Until the blood,” Thomas finishes.
“And the globs and globs of clots. When stuff stopped gushing from my body, Sonny walked out the door without a word. I didn’t hear from him again.”
“What did you think had happened?
“Didn’t know, really,” I say, wiping unseen sweat from my face. Thomas uses the bottom of his T-shirt to dab at my forehead. “I just remember taking myself to the ER, where some nurse told me I’d miscarried as coolly as someone talking about the weather.”
“Whoa,” I squeeze out the word. My hands clutch my sides. “Anyway, they performed a D&C after that.”
Quick breaths balloon my cheeks in faster intervals. As we walk to the car, water gushes down my legs. “Uh-oh!”
“Time?”
“Definitely,” I say. Thomas and I get in the car and ride to the hospital in silence, except for an occasional “help me Jesus” from me. When we arrive at the emergency room entrance, he helps me into the wheelchair and trots a distance behind the patient advocate who pushes me to the nurses’ station, where they triage me to a birthing room.
A little later, Thomas strokes my hair, feeds me ice chips.
“Can you forgive me?” I ask.
“You didn’t know what he planned to do, and even if you had participated, that reversal of rights made a lot of people do things they normally wouldn’t.”
The amber eyes return, glaring. “They may think differently,” I point and whine.
“Well, they would be wrong,” Thomas returns, looking around and seeing nothing.
I smile, then grimace.
A round-faced nurse with kind eyes looks at the monitor and asks, “Are we ready for the doctor, you think?”
I nod and minutes later the room fills with a doctor and a second nurse.
The doctor positions herself at the foot of my bed. Her hand lays lightly atop of my belly. “The time is here,” she says. “Push!”
I talk to the amber eyes. “I am so sorry. I loved you . . . wanted you,” I pause, watching. The amber eyes fix harder on me. Disbelief, I think.
Someone turns on music. I am happy they plucked a tune from the favorites on my play list. Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” plays softly in the background. I redirect my focus. Impressionist art, soft blue walls, floral curtains. The doctor’s voice ushers me back to the task at hand.
The hard amber eyes linger above me. “I know what you’re thinking,” I say to them. “I don’t deserve to be a mother. If I couldn’t protect you, how can I . . .
“Whoooo!”
“Mother, push,” the doctor urges. “Pushhhh,” she squeezes the word up from her diaphragm through her larynx and out of her mouth. The amber eyes zoom in on my face, and I tent my knees, ignoring the doctor’s orders.
Guilt and shame lodge in the furrows of my brows. The doctor pulls my knees apart. “These must stay apart, so we can see the baby when she comes,” the doctor says.
I squeeze my eyes shut, hold my breath. I want this baby so badly, but I betrayed the one before.
The amber eyes settle on top of my stomach. Their mouth lets out a low whine only I can hear.
They know I let them down. That’s why they are here . . .
I lurch toward the apparition. My doctor thinks I’m reacting to another harsh contraction.
“Mother, please. If you don’t get in this game, you, the little one or both may not survive,” she says, sweat forming on her forehead.
“Bernie, push,” Thomas begs.
“I let them down,” I gasp, looking into the amber eyes. “I’m so sorry.” I blow out quick breaths. “You’re right to be here…” My voice goes up several octaves. “… to remind me I don’t deserve this baby girl. Not even your love, Thomas.”
The doctor and nurses look quizzically at Thomas, who ignores them. This is something else our cultures share. No talking about family business in public.
Thomas kisses my hand. He counts the ways we love each other. Somewhere around number 10, he wraps up with “You’d sooner sacrifice yourself than harm someone else, especially a baby.”
The amber eyes soften to a brilliant brown.
I watch Thomas move from my side to the foot of my bed. His cheeks peak in anguish. He bites down on his lower lip. His dark, hooded eyes plead. “Bernie, you can do this. Pushhhhh.”
“Push,” Thomas says again. “Sonny stole your choice. I never will. He could live without you. I cannot.”
The doctor exchanges a glance with the nurses. One slants her eyes and twists her lips. The other hunches her shoulders.
Then, through medical equipment whirs, a tiny voice says . . .
First in your heart,
Though not with you long. I felt
Your love’s warmth. No blame.
I hear their lips suckle and then a tiny but firm, Mom, pushhh. “Ooooh,” I release, welcoming their validation. “Ooooh!”
Thomas’s eyes bulge and the doctor leans forward. “Mother, I see the head. I need you to push. Harder!”
Relief from the guilt and shame I have carried since my first failed pregnancy is almost immediate after that. The amber eyes twinkle and fade, like embers.
“Come on, Bernie,” Thomas encourages. “Let’s meet our little girl.” A smile wraps around my face before a contraction knocks it flat. I bear down with everything I have until my world opens for our little girl to enter.
A nurse lays the baby onto my chest, using a thin blanket to swaddle the two of us together. I unwrap the blanket to count fingers and toes.
Thomas moves back to my side. He cradles my head as we stare into our child’s large, brown eyes.
“Still want to name her Amanda, after my mother?” I ask, tilting my head to look him in the eyes. “Nah.”
I nod. “So, not Amanda. I guess you’ve given up on getting my mother to forgive you for marrying her daughter.”
“Nope. I want her acceptance, but I don’t need her forgiveness. It’s not my fault you picked a teacher, over some dude from Black Wall Street,” he says, hesitating. “You don’t need forgiveness either.”
I smile and pat my chest, just above my heart.
The nurse intercedes. She places my breast in my baby’s mouth. “I’ll visit you tomorrow to see how the breastfeeding is going, Mother. Just in case you have questions or concerns.”
My heart is full. I’m exhausted and sore, but I can’t stop smiling. “Okay, Mr. Not Black Wall Street. What’s a good name.”
“Kaiko,” Thomas says, kissing our child lightly on the cheek, “forgiveness child.”
Her eyes sparkle, like an old knowing soul. A sage. My fingers brush wisps of hair on her head. I nuzzle her face.
“Good morning, Kaiko,” I coo. “I almost missed you.”
Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, freelance journalist, and literary activist. Bell has had numerous short works published in journals and anthologies, including “To the Moon and Back,” Hypertext Journal, which was nominated for an Illinois Arts Council award and “Swimming,” Jet Fuel Review, which was selected as best small fiction by Somber Press. Swimming was also nominated as best short fiction on the web. Her speculative short fiction, “The Visit,” (published in Re-Living Mythology) received a favorable write up in the Publisher’s Weekly. In 2023 National League of American Pen, Inc. competition, Bell’s work was a Top Ten Finalist. In 2024, Bell’s play Death of a Marriage, an adaptation of a short story, was chosen as part of Definition Theater’s Amplify New Plays program. Bell is a co-founder of FLOW (For Love of Writing) and has collaborated with numerous writing and arts organizations, authors, and bookstores to offer literary programming in Chicago’s underserved communities. She’s currently working on the novel, Down and Dirty in Kosciusko, Mississippi.